Power! As Jeremy Clarkson is fond of shouting….But he should be shouting “Torque!”

Torque is the starting point of it all and an engine’s capability to turn the up/down motion of a piston into the rotating motion of a crankshaft is what it is all about. This isn’t a story about dynos, but what a dynamometer does is calculate power from actual torque. It is a machine that measures the ability of the car’s wheels to rotate a roller of a known weight up to given speed in a period of time. Power is obtained from this via a calculation, with the torque figure playing an important part…

But be that as it may, we all know that numbers like 600kW and 1 000Nm are BIG. That’s like four stock standard Polo GTIs! And those are the kind of numbers we’ve getting out of one of our most serious project cars yet – a current-generation F12 M6 which we’ve progressively made more and more radical. It’s already the fastest of its kind in the country – as far as we have been able to ascertain – having recently demolished a standing kilometre at just over 275 km/h!

Now it’s time for the next phase and we’ve got a terminal speed of 280 km/h in our sights…

So we’ve raised the stakes, giving our tuning gurus the go-ahead to delve even deeper into their Little Black Book of tweaks and tricks – which included fuelling the M6 with a blend of 95 pump fuel and our new Torque octane-enhancing race fuel.

With it strapped down extra-tight, the big 8-cylinder powerplant almost sent the readouts off the scale: final figures corrected back to the flywheel are now 680kW and 1 019Nm – as we said BIG numbers!

All we need now is to find the time for a trip to ODI, which is where Jacques “The Stiglet” Joubert set the current record of 275.5 km/h, to see if he can rewrite the record books once again!